cinemattraction

If you squint a bit at the layers of saturated colors and luminous atmosphere, My Blueberry Nights does resemble a proper Wong Kar-wai film; but trouble starts as soon as anyone in it opens his or her mouth. Not only do Wong’s better instincts seem to have become befuddled by the shift into English, but he appears to have addressed the potential pitfalls of style over substance by tackling a story with no substance at all.

The plot follows Elizabeth (Norah Jones), first found unburdening her broken heart to New York barman Jeremy (Jude Law) who supplies her with homilies and pastries in equal measure. Motivated to set off on a long-term road trip, she washes up in Memphis and has a ringside seat for the self-destructive marriage of Arnie (David Strathairn, sinking into impressive self-loathing) and Sue Lynne (a very shrill Rachel Weisz). Then onward to Nevada, and into the orbit of card shark Leslie (Natalie Portman) and her unresolved parental issues. Renewed by these encounters in ways hinted at in the intermittent voiceover but not immediately apparent in the performance, Elizabeth returns to Jeremy.

And that’s all of it. The allure of Wong’s previous films has rarely been the plot mechanics; In the Mood For Love could be summarized in even fewer words, but that film’s love story is still nearly bottomless. But this film’s characters are too thin to stand upright. The debuting Jones handles herself well enough, but the part is a nightmare, a sounding board for everyone else’s burdens. Scene after scene involves Jones slowly shifting from a seated position, down through a drowsy pose propped on one elbow, to finish up recumbent with her head on the bar, a lock or two of hair falling over her decorously closed eyes. Weisz’s hair does a similar trick.

Wong’s conviction that women adopt this pose so that men can gaze at them from a range of three inches is rather quaint, but becoming programmatic. Even in his ad for BMW, Adriana Lima assumed the position and Clive Owen did the gazing. Only Portman, not called upon to be remotely sultry, has hair that stays put, a blonde dye-job energized vertically by the crackling brain beneath it. Portman lucks into the only part with any energy, a showy Southern firecracker in a dress that makes your retinas itch. She also gets to venture briefly out into the desert, the only real sighting of the American outdoors in this road-less road movie. Law, stuck with the same cheeky-chappie turn that’s nearly shipwrecked his career and an accent that ambles across the English mainland, is a very unfortunate spectacle.

That said, something very odd happens for two minutes in the middle when singer Chan Marshall turns up as Jeremy’s ex-girlfriend. Marshall brings with her an easy empathy of such a different stripe to everyone else that, just for a minute, the whole film tilts in Jeremy’s direction, as if he could be a Wong roué in the line back through Tony Leung and beyond, and this might actually be his story after all. It’s a fleeting glimpse of a more interesting film, but Jeremy’s soon back to his baking.

The film’s a confounding misfire, every moment of visual impact matched with a duff line, every refrain of Marshall’s melancholy “The Greatest” balanced by “Try a Little Tenderness” to assist the hard of seeing. It’s a mighty disappointment coming from Wong, who conjured more emotion than this in any 10 minutes of In the Mood For Love and any 10 seconds of 2046. His exquisite eye for shimmering neon is still intact, but this film seems to have shorted out.

© 2008 Tim Hayes. All rights reserved.

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